The invention relates to the field of communication receivers, and in particular to a receiver design that provides a unique way to reach and exceed the performance levels required by the EDGE cellular standard, taking into consideration propagation conditions, overall modem performance, and implementation complexity of a receiver.
Digital data receiver designs is a critical part of the EDGE system development, providing a base for performance differentiation through the type approval and operator acceptance process, and afterwards even more as a driver of complexity and power of the wireless terminal. In the case of EDGE, this is critical because of the complex modulation format, different modulation and coding scenarios, and possibility of link adaptation, which further stresses the importance of a high performance data receiver design. Furthermore, specific implementations of EDGE receivers have to take into account imperfections of RF front end (e.g., DC offset, I/Q gain and phase imbalance, phase noise, analog filters) and digital receive filters that can be part of a mixed signal chip. However, performance of the EDGE data receiver depends on a number of factors that a designer cannot influence (e.g., propagating conditions, interference) as well as selection of parameters of the receiver in a given scenario, which provides a multidimensional problem in making design choices even when the elements of the receiver are known from prior art.